My throat! Is on fi-yah! or Fi-yrrrrrr, depending on my mood...either way, it Burns like a C. Montgomery.

Internet, I'm sick. It's not quite the plague, but I'm pretty sure it's close. Or maybe it's just a bad cough/cold with some awful nasal drip, and I'm being a big baby about it. Yeah, possibly the latter.

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Work is still busy. It's not supposed to be busy during interim, but we're trying to cram three months' worth of work into one. I'll give you one guess as to the why of it. (Think hard. Here's a hint: "primary" doesn't just refer to a color, and November isn't just the month for Thanksgiving. Have you seen the television ads starting up yet? I have, and they annoy me to death, too.)
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I'm thankful the rain is over, at least for a little while. Friday night some of the roads around me flooded, but I'm happy to report I wasn't on any of them at the time, and managed to get around the road closures the rest of the weekend.

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So. The regatta on Saturday: I managed not to die. Threw up in the middle of my first race of the day, but Internet, it was a singles race, so it's not like there was anyone in the boat besides me. I kept going (no one can call me a quitter! passing out is the only thing that will ever stop me from finishing a race), and managed to win my flight, but when added to the other flight (kinda like a heat, but without a final - my final place in the race results was based on time), my finish wasn't exactly fast. Oh, well. It's hard to figure out how you're doing when you're only racing half the boats. and also puking. It's been suggested that my new nickname can be Puke-ahontas, after the events of this spring and early summer.

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Sunday I went to Iowa with some of the dad's fam to a small church in Hardy. (Speaking of rain and flooding, the area around Hardy is pretty much completely underwater right now. I've never seen anything quite like it there before, and probably won't again any time soon.) We did an extended family reunion on the day they were closing the church my relatives helped start 125 years ago. A little sad that the congregation is too small to keep the church going, but that's what's happened in a lot of small farming communities. The cemetery where my grandparents are buried is still there, though, and will be kept up by the county. The church building itself is coming down. Seven of the eight remaining siblings (my dad and 6 of his brothers and sisters) made it down for the final service, but I only managed to round up six of them for the picture above.

On a side note, for the second time in my life, I took a hymnal from a church (and just like before, I had permission to do it). I don't know what it is about old hymnals, but I have an affinity for them (particularly if the hymnal actually has some personal meaning, like I went to a church that used them, or in this case, my oldest aunt was baptized at the church and a bunch of my family are buried in the cemetery where this latest hymnal is from).

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Internet, I'm on a huge memoir kick. I finally finished reading The Blind Side ( = great book, great story), and then moved on to I'm Down. I wanted to read it based on the cover alone. All in all, the book was pretty funny (warning: she does use some colorful language, but that's probably obvious based on the premise of the book). I hope she writes another book on the next chapter of her life, because I want to know what happened in her life after the last page ended.